WB gives $10m to set up data centre

The World Bank is set to provide an additional $10 million to its public procurement project in Bangladesh to set up a modern data centre with 200 terra-byte storage capacity.

An agreement for the loan was signed yesterday between the Economic Relations Division and the Washington-based multilateral lender in Dhaka.

With robust security features and 180 times more capacity, the new centre will offer storage for 8.6 million tenders and support about 325,000 registered bidders, the WB said in a statement.

Bangladesh has made a gradual improvement in its public procurement system by shifting from traditional procurement practices to international standards through digitisation, said Rajashree Paralkar, the acting country director of the WB. The additional financing will contribute to further strengthen the capacity of the procurement system and meet the growing demand of the procurement entities.

“This in turn will improve the country's investment climate and accelerate the pace of poverty reduction.”

The financing will also continue to support professional certification and training on public procurement.

The public procurement project has so far helped 89 officials receive member status and professional diplomas at the Britain-based Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, while 84 have completed their masters' degrees in procurement.

The project has facilitated training on public procurement for about 2,700 participants, ensuring that over 85 percent of the four key procuring entities have at least one trained staff.

The introduction of electronic government procurement in recent years has laid a good foundation of public procurement, said Kazi Shofiqul Azam, additional secretary of ERD.

As a result, transaction costs have gone down and tender processing time has come down from 51 days in 2012 to 29 days in 2015, he said.

Bangladesh has processed more than 55,000 government tenders online at a total value of about $5.8 billion and registered 21,000 bidders under the e-GP system since 2012.

With the additional financing, a data centre with increased capacity will enable other public sector agencies to access the e-GP platform, he added.